We all need it. We all use it. In fact, we use enormous amounts of it and, since the Industrial Revolution, we have mostly taken it for granted and thought little of how it got to us or how we used and/or wasted it.

The energy we use has a cost, and that cost goes far, far beyond the money we spend to buy it. Be it fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) or nuclear power, this energy has cost us dearly. Aside from the climate change impacts of burning fossil fuels (whether you subscribe to this theory or not), there is also the staggering toll taken on our health and environment from the extraction (loss of habitats, ground and surface water contamination, loss of human lives as well as wildlife), processing (more of the same, plus the energy and water consumed) and burning (disease, cancer, deaths, air/water pollution, smog) of these fuels. While nuclear power doesn’t spew out much in the way of greenhouse gas emissions, the risks and implications of dealing with the radioactive spent fuel rods will endure for millennia. And this doesn’t even include the impacts of massive oil/fuel spills (not to mention the cumulative effect of millions of smaller ones every year) and nuclear disasters.

Add up all the tax money spent on environmental clean ups, health care and subsidies and the real price you pay for that energy goes way beyond the price per gallon or price per kilowatt-hour.

The dollars per unit of energy we pay are simply the monetary “costs”. We tend to have a misguided view that everything be seen in terms of economics and stock valuations, and this has been very destructive. Economic “growth” cannot continue in its current form, perpetually, at the expense of the environment we live in; we simply do not have the resources available to produce, consume and throw away the way we have without poisoning the entire planet, and in fairly short order. Think just in terms of what it’s all doing to our food and water supplies, as well as our air, and this issue should be of paramount concern to every person alive.

There are really only 3 ways to improve this situation:

1. Develop clean, renewable energy sources – This takes years. There are promising results, and more needs to be done more quickly, especially in North America, where we are way behind other countries.

2. Reduce consumption
– A relatively easy thing to accomplish, if we choose to, though human population growth makes total consumption difficult to keep in check. How many times do you see dozens, or hundreds, of lights on in an empty building at night? There are easily tens of millions of them every night around the world. Think how much energy could be saved and talk to the people who manage the building you work in.

3. Increase efficiency
– Probably the most effective way to decrease energy use quickly. Our homes and buildings consume nearly 50% of all energy used, most of which is for space heating/cooling and water heating. The opportunities are there to save enormous amounts of energy, and money, and in turn reduce environmental impacts.

No rational person will fool themselves into thinking fossil fuels and nuclear power will go away next year or even next decade. We can, and must, however, take a multitude of steps toward significantly reducing their use in the coming years while more quickly developing the alternatives that will eventually replace them. There has to be a very strong political and public will to do this, as well as a focus on looking beyond our immediate wants and needs, if this process is to accelerate enough to avert an almost inevitable global ecological disaster. In the grand scheme of things, making these changes will not cost us…it will save us.

A touch of doom and gloom? Perhaps; but maybe that’s exactly what’s needed to snap our collective minds to attention when it comes to our future.

All houses are not created equal – not by a long shot. Even houses of a similar size and style can, and sometimes should, have significant differences between them. Many of these differences are unseen or not obvious, but nonetheless important.

There are certainly no “one-size-fits-all” approaches as every building is different, as are its occupants and their preferences and budgets. To properly design a new home, or to plan major upgrades to an existing one, there are many things to consider and plan for: size and type, floor plan, lot layout, lot location, climate, soil conditions, orientation to the sun, the building’s integration into the land, foundation configuration, trees, shading, wind, grading and drainage, landscaping, water and sewer considerations, energy sources (geothermal, solar, electric, etc), insulation systems and thicknesses, plumbing, electrical, control systems, structural considerations, decks, water usage/conservation, interior/exterior materials, appliances, lighting, windows & doors, ventilation, heating/cooling, roof overhangs, roof pitch and configuration,…and, of course, the building envelope itself ( http://bit.ly/hL5bls ) and its proper design for the house/location. These items affect not just a home’s energy efficiency, but also its comfort and enjoyability, all of which ultimately affect its value.

Each of the items in this list needs to be addressed in order to maximize free heat energy from the sun, ensure efficient use of energy and water, create good indoor comfort and air quality, and enjoy the whole property. What’s crucial to understand is that changing 1 or more of these items will often create a “domino-effect” across several areas of the project making it important to reassess the big picture. For example, a given house plan with a great view from the back will likely have you wanting more, and larger, windows there. Whether the back faces north or south will have a very large effect on choosing the types of windows to use, the size of them, the roof overhang, the flooring types in the rooms with these windows, use of thermal mass, the heating system capacity and type, roof configuration, possibilities for solar panel usage and even how you may decide to integrate hot-water heating.

Any builder worth investing your hard-earned money in (large amounts, I might add) will be able to do this intelligently and provide you with multiple options while answering all of your questions and helping you to understand the value of each one given your individual circumstances. If they can’t, or won’t (as someone I recently spoke to recounted from a meeting with a builder), then it’s time to change builders.

You get to do this once on a given house and then live with the results for sometimes many years, or even decades. Doing it right means treating your home and property as an integrated system whose parts work together to keep you comfortable, save you significant energy dollars every month and give you a durable home that will return the best value for your investment.

If you build, renovate or put an addition on your home or building, there is a set of standards (a.k.a. – specifications) you choose and a building code you must meet. If you’re buying an existing structure then you’re stuck with whatever set of standards was put into it before; unless you plan to upgrade it. If it’s more than 15 years old, energy-efficiency upgrades should be seriously considered, depending on the building’s original construction.

Every province (and some municipalities) has a set of minimum building code requirements, which work in conjunction with the National Building Code, that all construction must meet, and they are just that – minimums. These codes are there to ensure the building or house is structurally sound and has a reasonable amount of insulation in it – again, minimums. With increasing importance being placed on energy conservation, some provinces, including Nova Scotia, have increased their minimums for insulation requirements and considering where energy prices are inevitably going, you can be sure these “minimums” will continue to increase. What that means is that a home built now to meet minimum codes will actually fall short of the basic requirements in the near future, and that will likely mean decreased value associated with that building when it gets compared to others 5 or 10 years from now.

A standard is a set of design/performance specifications for the building that incorporates things like the building envelope, heating and ventilation systems, passive solar features, air-leakage maximums, renewable energy usage, water conservation measures, thermal mass features, appliance and lighting requirements, materials, etc. Some, like R-2000, have been around for some time and have seen some improvements with changes in code requirements. Others, like Passive House and LEED for Homes, are newer to Canada and set very high efficiency standards. There are also less formalized sets of specifications that a given builder may use to produce a very efficient building. With some research, and asking some questions, anyone looking to build or upgrade to high efficiency standards can find what works for them, and their specific situation.

Any time you are going to build or upgrade, careful planning and consideration should be given to the specifications you build to. Again, with where energy prices will go in the coming years, even from renewable sources, building high efficiencies into your project is a sound investment. If the building is highly efficient, every time energy costs go up (which is almost every year!) you are effectively enjoying more savings and that puts more value in your home or office, not to mention how much less you spend on operating costs. It’s already happening in some places in Canada that a property’s value is being assessed on its energy rating and you can expect that will happen here as well. So if you build or upgrade now well above minimum standards, guess whose house will be at the high end of the value scale later on? Yours will be one of the most valuable in the neighbourhood.

So remember, the next time you see a contractor or seller referring to how the house or building they are selling “meets standards”, find out if that means the building code minimum, or something barely above it. They’re not legally allowed to give you any less…so if that’s the case, they should probably stop trying to pat themselves on the back so hard.

We need to be ahead of the curve using more up-to-date standards, materials and technology; and it will actually cost you less given the price of energy in the future and the added value that efficiency will give your home or building. Building only to today’s minimum standards, or barely above them, is short-sighted and will eventually cost both financially and environmentally.

For a complete thermal break, sheets of rigid high-density insulation are placed between the studs and sheathing, instead of the horizontal 2x4s in the video, and then the spray foam is applied for a complete air/vapour seal and a high level of insulation. The total R value can be adjusted by using thicker rigid insulation and a 2×6 stud wall for up to an R45 wall system with no air leakage.

In fact, the insulation system for the whole house or building, including foundation, walls and ceiling, is customizable to suit conditions, usage and owner preference. That’s the beauty of the InnovaWall.

Well, sometimes it is, and the answer opens up a whole lot more issues than just keeping your feet warm.

Many people over the past 15 years or so have built homes with radiant in-floor heating systems. It’s a nice feeling to have warm feet as you walk on the floors and it did a pretty good job heating your home.

So why did so many switch? First of all, the technology was there and it became easier to put in place with electric, oil and gas-fired boilers. But let’s back up a couple of steps and think about why the floors were so cold to start with. I call it “Cold Basement Syndrome” and it was the result of foundations that were either poorly insulated, or not at all. The upper floors were decently warm but the floor on the main level felt cold due to the cold basement. So in went the radiant heat systems and floors were now warm.

Then came the growing popularity of heat pumps, which also had cooling capabilities, so people were installing them, too.

Wait a minute! An in-floor radiant system with boiler AND a heat pump to cool? Why on earth would someone spend the money on both? Where’s the disconnect here? Considering that due to building code requirements in new houses you now must have a ductwork system in place anyway for air circulation, and that the foundations must be insulated, why spend money on the in-floor system when the heat pump can do it all? Still want that “warm-floor” feeling in your ceramic tile bathroom or kitchen in the morning? Install electric radiant heat pads in these areas that come with programmable thermostats so it’s nice and toasty when you get up in the morning and then shuts off after you leave.

Remember that the efficiency of oil/gas/electric boilers are in the 85-97% range. While that may sound good at first glance, you’re always getting less out of it than you put into it. Put another way, you are buying more energy than the system can give you. On the other hand, air source and geothermal (ground source) heat pumps operate at 300-500% efficiency, meaning that for every unit of energy you buy to run the system, it puts out 3-5 units of energy for heating, depending on the unit. That’s a nice return on investment via huge reductions in energy usage, not to mention the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

On top of that, the heat pumps also give you the ability to cool and dehumidify if you wish (anyone in Nova Scotia experience frequent fog/high humidity?!). Don’t need cooling, you say? No problem; you simply turn off the heat pump and the HRV (Heat Recovery Ventilator) still runs with the air-exchange system to keep inside air fresh and cooler than outside. If there’s a heat-wave then put the heat pump on cooling mode for only as long as needed. As an added bonus, the geothermal system will also pre-heat your domestic hot water for even further energy, and money, savings. This is a significant saving as hot water heating is #2 in energy consumption in our homes next to space heating. With a geothermal system on cooling mode in the summer, it dumps all the heat it pulls out of the house into the hot water system so that you spend virtually nothing to heat your hot water. If the house is suited, Solar panels can be added to pre-heat domestic hot water and reduce the need to purchase energy.

Some will say if you build slab-on-grade style that you have to do in-floor heating so the slab isn’t cold. If the slab is properly constructed and well-insulated (never just minimum code) then there is no reason for that slab to be cold. Every building should have passive solar features taken into consideration as much as possible so that free solar energy is absorbed by that slab during the day and released slowly at night.

You will often hear me say that when you invest in planning and constructing a very efficient building envelope, your heating system will have much less work to do, thereby using much less energy, and that means a lot less money for you to spend. This is what all buildings should focus on so make sure your builder is addressing the items that affect this directly – it’s the easiest, most effective way to reduce energy consumption.

Whether new construction or retrofit, every home is different and should be evaluated on its location, orientation to the sun, integration into the land, occupant requirements and desires, size, configuration and budget. When these items are appropriately addressed, and your home is looked at as the complete system that it is, you’ll end up with a comfortable place to live that costs you less, is worth more and uses far less energy.

We all know that insulation is important to keeping our homes and buildings warm in winter and cooler in summer. The most commonly used type of insulation is fibreglass batts that come in bags.

Is this fibreglass batt insulation effective? For the most part, no. The most critical aspect is if the insulation is properly installed and (here’s the kicker that’s often overlooked) that it is incorporated effectively into a wall or ceiling system. The fact that this insulation exists in your walls does not make it effective. In fact, an alarmingly high percentage of building envelopes (see my previous post on this) are not properly installed, making the insulation much less effective than the R-value of the product. More precisely, the biggest factor is air leakage and flow through the building envelope. Air leakage accounts for more heat loss than the effective R-value of insulation.

You can look at a bag of fibreglass batt insulation and it will tell you it is, for example, R20. In a lab, under ideal conditions, with no air flow and no moisture present, it will indeed perform at R20 – through the middle of a nice, perfectly fluffed-up batt. Exactly the kind of conditions that are almost NEVER found in the real world in an actual installation. In a real-life situation, batts are stuffed in tight spaces, pushed around pipes and wires, have gaps around the edges and end up inside a wall cavity that will have cold, damp air flowing into, around and through it. When batt insulations are compressed or encounter moisture (fog and high humidity anyone?) their effective R-value drops dramatically. Allow air to flow through or around them and the same thing happens – large drops in effective R-value.

Ahhh, but the modern “efficient” house is well air-sealed you say? And it has blower-door tests that prove the air-leakage is reduced? Let’s look at what, exactly, this tells us. Sure, the low air-leakage is a good thing, but what does the blower-door test really tell you? It tells you how much air is leaking past the air/vapour barrier. And where is this air/vapour barrier? In a typically constructed house, it’s up against the back of your drywall; yes THAT drywall that people will later poke holes through to hang picture frames, decorations, etc. So what it tells you is that only so much air gets past the drywall, however when you think about it, that means that cold air is flowing up against the drywall, creating heat loss. If it’s getting to the drywall, that means it has to go through and around the batt insulation, and we just talked about what that means – dramatically lowered effective R-values in your walls.

It is for the above reasons that I will not use fibreglass batt insulation in a building. It is an outdated, ineffective way to insulate a building and it is time we retired it.

In a future post, I’ll discuss other types of insulation and wall systems, including my InnovaWall System, and how they work.

Let’s be honest with ourselves. As Canadians, we consume many times more natural resources per-capita than every “less-developed” country. In fact, if every country in the world consumed as much as we did, we would require the equivalent of about 4 planet Earths to sustain everyone.

What is “sustainability”, anyway? CMHC defines it as “…an economic, social, and environmental concept that involves meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Another source simplifies it as “the ability to endure.” Any way you slice it, we should expect of ourselves that each generation leaves the planet in such a condition that the next can prosper and survive.

Are we doing this? Quite frankly…no, we are not. And why is that? Part of it is greed and part of it is simply not thinking (or caring) about the long-term implications of our lifestyles. In Canada, resources have historically been relatively “cheap” for us. Who worried about how efficient their houses and offices were? No matter how you heated it, it was inexpensive to do so and the fuels were plentiful and easily accessible.

Enter the oil crisis of the 1970s, the Gulf War of the 1990s and the dot-com crash of the 2000s. Add in geopolitical instabilities in multiple areas of the world, an Exxon Valdez here and a Gulf of Mexico oil spill there and we have volatility that holds millions hostage to the prices of oil and natural gas – commodities that some would argue are past their heyday, and most would admit are harming our environment in a very big way.

But what’s a community/province/region/country to do? Well, you start by changing policies and people’s expectations of where they get their energy from. You start to educate as many businesses and homeowners as possible about the advantages of renewable energy, energy independence and, even more importantly, the value in reducing energy consumption. That’s where every homeowner, potential homeowner, business owner, landlord and anyone else with a building that consumes energy comes in. Our buildings use 40-50% of all energy consumed and, given that many are very inefficient, this offers one of the biggest opportunities for energy usage reduction out there. And, unlike global commodity markets, it’s opportunity that we have control over as individuals.

Whether through new construction or the upgrading of the millions of existing buildings that are enormous energy-wasters, we have the ability to significantly reduce energy consumption, and in turn greenhouse gas emissions, and save ourselves a ton of money in the process. It’s a real no-brainer when you take time to analyze the cost-benefit of doing this so let’s make a concerted effort to collectively move toward making all our buildings energy-efficient when it comes time to build or upgrade.

When I say energy-efficient, I mean truly efficient – so that means not falling for false promises and “greenwashed” products. It means moving away from “traditional” construction methods and using new products and better specifications for all buildings. Many of today’s claimed “efficient” homes use obsolete insulation systems, are poorly put together with little attention to important details and waste far more energy than they need to.

With a little research and effort, asking the right questions and seeing through the bogus claims, we can all do our part to help move our communities, and society in general, toward something sustainable that we can feel good about passing along to the next generation. I’ve made it my mission to help as many people and businesses as possible accomplish this and any time our efforts move us closer to a sustainable community, we can all feel a little bit better about the legacy we leave.

This is not just important…it is critical to our survival as a society.